Making your tracks sound larger

[TheWinterSnow]

Part II:http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/8472262-post102.html
http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/...g-your-tracks-sound-larger-5.html#post8472262

More to come!

took me forever to do but, here it is:

Ever spent hours recording a song, mixing and mastering it, to listen back to it and compare it to other songs and find that compared to say a commercial release or a press release from a small unsigned band or local band, yours sounds sound, thin, airy, washed out, and no matter how hard you try, you absolutely cannot EQ it out or do any processing to it that won’t absolutely ruin the mix? In my opinion you have fallen prey to the ice coldness of the digital realm. There are a few components to make a warm thick, deep and clear sounding mix and those are Compression, EQ, Analog Saturation, Harmonic Excitement, Reverb and Limiting. I will be going over one of the less looked at remedy of analog, more specifically, analog emulation. To make it short, Analog is not a perfect medium, what you put in is not what you get out; digital on the other hand, captures exactly what it gets. Prior to digital we learned to cope with the coloration as well as other phase and non linear effects of analog and that became a huge part of the overall sound. In today’s digital world its hard to recreate the relics of the day short of doing what modern studios do such as running tons of tube preamps, an SSL board as well as a whole assload of outboard gear including 4 track reel to reel tapes to send your bus outs into before mixing it back down into the digital realm for mass reproduction, but most of us don’t have that kind of income for that type of studio. So we will use digital to recreate what digital has lost us, the clean warm sound of analog.

Analog compressions, EQ’s, Reverbs and Limiters are said to be the Holy Grail of tone from their slightly warm coloration, phase effects and a balance of linear and non-linear processes. This leads me to my next point, if you use ITB parametric EQ’s, I highly suggest that you use a 32 or 64 bit linear eq and compression because they are way more acculturate, and not as sterile and harsh as cheap logarithmic plug-ins that come stock with most DAW’s, you will hear a huge difference in your EQing and Compressing power and workflow.

This small little piece of information I am about to give you is a bit different from the norm. All files will be available for download only, only to save myself time and also so that anyone who wants to get their practice up can have the raw tracks from each and the processed tracks to compare to.

When I first started getting more "pro" sounding recordings I had always wondered what made their results better than mine. I could get the tone and mix that they had but I could never find how they achieved the depth and clarity to my weak, almost fizzy sound. It was extremely difficult to obtain their same results. But look at my less than 1K studio compared to these Multi Million dollar studios, however for the price difference, the small home studios of the day are getting pretty close. But let’s get into why the big guys sound better.

Now this is not one of those end all magic pills that will give you absolute pro tone. That results in years of experience, high quality acoustics and gear. The subtleties in what I will go over are pretty small, however in a full mix with the right EQ, compression, reverb and limiting for the session; your mixes will sound more solid and thicker, with a higher detail of clarity than before.

 

[TheWinterSnow]

Harmonic Content

It’s not just the frequency response itself that you are looking for. If you know, a sound that you can distinguish as a person's voice or a guitar, drums etc are all because of the harmonics above the fundamental frequency. Exactly where those harmonics are (their pitch relative to the fundamental), how loud they are, and how many there are all together achieve the result of a particular sound, and is a must for realistic sounding instruments, hence that is why to this day we still do not have completely realistic instrument emulators and why we can tell they are fake. Natural Harmonics are heard exceptionally well when you hear an instrument live. It is however unfortunate, but, the complex richness of an instrument live is hindered quite badly once it is ran through a mic. Try to achieve the same thickness is the bass, its muddy, try to get the detailed highs, its shrill and harsh. The use of class A tube preamplifiers in any decent studio is to re-excite those harmonics before it is recorded to the DAW or even tape, since the natural harmonic content isn't lost due to the recording of a digital medium (or analog for that matter), its the lack of detail from the mic (and sometimes a cheap preamp) itself. In your modern recordings by today's standard, we are not only compensating for this, but we are trying to exaggerate this effect to make recordings sound larger than life, make them deeper in recording than the live band that played that session.

Harmonic Distortion (Tube Saturation)

One of the best ways to artificially recreate the loss of harmonics is to use a tube and saturate it just enough so that the fundamental and earlier harmonics are compressed and allow the higher order harmonics to come up in volume. When done correctly, the result is a smoother, warmer high end, and tighter bass. You will not however achieve overall warmth, almost the opposite; since you are compressing the fundamental (and the warmer lower harmonics) you are actually achieving and overall brighter sound. The whole idea behind tube Saturation is that you NEVER want the clipping to be heard. If you can hear clipping, then you need to turn it down, unless you were going for that effect on guitars that was well known to be done by Nirvana, you will actually be counterproductive to your mix. Voxengo has a great description about how this harmonic excitement works

You should understand that Warmifier performs subtle non-linear processing meaning that it mainly creates harmonics while not touching other aspects of the sound (like frequency balance or dynamics). This in many instants makes evaluation a hard task even for a professional sound engineer. To be sure what Warmifier does one should have enough experience with harmonic coloration and should use high quality monitoring environment.

There is then a table that shows the effect of subtle non-linear tube saturation. http://www.voxengo.com/product/warmifier/

Tape Coloration and Saturation

Tape saturates and compresses in the same natural way just as tubes do, however the end result is a bit different. One of tape's inherent flaws which later has become one of its legends is the fact that it colors the tone (and each tape type will have different effects) more or so than tubes, since tube don't really start to color until you get heavy on the saturation, they do color the sound, but not as noticeable as tape. Take this example: If you pull out an old cassette tape and recorder and up plug it into your radio and record a song, when you turn the radio off, rewind the tape and play it back, you will notice that the sound on that tape was not the same as it was when you heard that song on the radio. The effect is that the highs aren't there and there is a good peak in the mids, and overall smoother sound, warmer sound, for the sacrifice of clean and even response and clarity. Even though cassettes are of a lot lower quality than the 4 track reel to reel and cassette recorders themselves were not as good in their fidelity than if you were to buy a pro release cassette but this "low" fidelity example exaggerates the effect. The result of tape naturally making the tone that passes through it darker is what makes its saturation so different. When the signal from tape clips, it is a very soft limiter, the darker the tape, the smoother and sludgier the clipping is. This makes the effect of hiding clipping a hell of a lot easier since we can hear the fine high frequency buzz saw effect when a digital signal is clipping, the pops and fizz and all that other junk that is highly unmusical

Tape: To Saturate, or Not To Saturate

The idea of using analog outboard gear (or emulators) is to color the tone in such a way that the final result sounds as natural as possible. The ultimate decision is however, whether you should saturate something that has obvious clipping, or little to no clipping at all. But before I go into a little observation that I have made: massive clipping (saturation) restores any coloration to a signal that doesn’t have a balanced frequency response. What does this mean? Essentially if you have a signal that doesn’t not have a uniform response or has lost a substantial amount of its harmonic content and as a result, sounds thin, harsh, weak, has strong resonant peaks and notches or a mix of the four. Saturation essentially brings up the volume of the smaller pieces without affecting the higher volume sections. This is a cost to the cleanliness however since the byproduct is obvious clipping. If you have and instrument that sounds weak but you cannot saturate it, the effect of coloration and little to no saturation is used.

Here is a guideline of basic Rock/Metal Instruments that as a general rule should but saturated or colored:

Medium/High Gain Guitars: Saturated
Low Gain (Clean) Guitars: Colored
Bass: Saturated or Colored (Saturation for most rock and metal)
Drums: Colored
Vocals: Saturated or Colored (the use of coloration with mild saturation)
Most Synth/Keyboard Patches: Colored

**Note** If you can hear obvious clipping, the gain is TOO HIGH!!! Turn it down; we are not trying to compete with Death Magnetic

Why use Tape and tube emulation (or if you have the money, the “reel” deal)?

Because ITB has this inherit “digital” sound. What is thin, lifeless, lacks dynamic, what some call sterile because there is no human-like warmth about it. If your mixes are thin and you can’t EQ or compress your way to make them sound bigger, tubes and tape (as well as other analog emulated effects) is the quickest way to add depth to your mixes as well as making the highs smoother and easier on the ears. Analog saturation in general adds a colorful sound by smoothing out frequency peaks which you can find quite annoying as well.

 

[TheWinterSnow]

The Process:

**Note** The example song we will go through is about a 40 second bit of one of my newest songs, I have re-recoded it just for this tutorial. To be honest I am still relatively new at this and my need to rush as to get this released as soon as possible lead me to making many mistakes (because I didn’t take breaks) and had to go back and redo them. The settings posted here are most likely not the final result that you will hear in the end. I have mild tinnitus and extremely poor acoustics in my room (and a poor monitor system) which makes it hard for me to accurately monitor what I am mixing. It also doesn’t help that I try to record, mix and master everything all in one sitting without a single break and no days rest in-between stages (recording, mixing and mastering). I am telling you this simply because I don’t feel like hearing noobs saying “your examples sound like shit they are not pro, your information is useless”. It is simply a disclaimer so if you don’t read this and still bitch, well then you just made yourself look like an idiot. Where my execution of the practice (in my opinion) may lack, my knowledge and theory of the practice does not.

With that aside:

Let’s start off with the raw tracks. As you can see I have loaded them up and normalized all the tracks so that they all peak at 0db. First thing is first though, with my Raw Drums, they are a little off. I added some EQ to both as well as some passing on the kick and reverb on the snare. When I was sequencing the drums I added compression to the snare and did a high pass at 200, the compression was a 4:1 with 10ms attack and 150ms release with the threshold just backed off when you begin to hear extreme pumping on the solo track. The end result comes out like this

http://www.mediafire.com/?nwmnmo132yh

Bass is unaffected and left raw from when I recorded it

http://www.mediafire.com/?zqbzxo4ywah

Guitars need some work before they are ready; as these are raw straight from the mic they need some trimming.

http://www.mediafire.com/?zfuzjgmuzjm

First, since they are quad tracked, the 3rd and 4th guitars need to be brought down 3db. Next you need a low pass at 12k. There is some more work that needs to be done, but we will wait until we run it through some saturation and do some post EQ.

http://www.mediafire.com/?yji2mtdiqhu

Orchestra here is left natural, the only problem with it is that the highs are a little too soft but instead of EQ’ing it, this is an issue tape can take care of, so we will see where it is after we run it through some tape and see if it still needs work.

http://www.mediafire.com/?enhm3jcqyzz

 

[TheWinterSnow]

And so we begin

I am using Voxengo TapeBus and Voxengo Warmifier for this example, you can use any other emulator, or if you have the money a real reel to reel tape machine, but don’t ask me how to work any of that because I won’t be able to help you with a real tape machine.

We will start off with the drums. We want a darker sounding tape which with TapeBus is the 2 series, (especially 2B). For the drums we will use 2B and we will not saturate the tape. You want to bring the saturation levels down but try to keep the recording level as high as possible. The goal is to get the signal as hot as possible so you get compression without clipping. With TapeBus the red meter in the middle is your indicator, when the red hits all the way to the bottom, you are clipping, as long as the signal does not get too hot, your drums should be golden

http://www.mediafire.com/?lzmgtyjfjod

Same goes for bass but we want to achieve slipping so some degree. However this in a way isn’t too necessary since the bass has already been distorted through the amp for some breakup, we just want to add enough tube saturation to get a sludgier type of sound.

http://www.mediafire.com/?mmftjmlwm2z

Guitars are where things begin to get fun. This is where we want the signal to clip in the tape. We don’t want so much compression, but more coloration and soft clipping, and quite enough of it to be heard when the guitars are by themselves. This recreates the bright clipping that came through of a speaker naturally that become extremely unmusical once it is recorded (remember the low pass at 12K, well we are restoring it again)

http://www.mediafire.com/?ofmmdzmhzt3

Orchestra we have the same way of thinking as we do with the drums, we want to compress and warm up the sound but want to keep clipping to a minimum if at all

http://www.mediafire.com/?mzxkdd00enm

 

[TheWinterSnow]

About Getting the Right Settings:

It’s a matter of experimentation, the less gain a clipping an instrument has, the less clipping you can get away with. You have to experiment with how hot you want the signal to go into the tape, how much you want to clip and post EQ controls on the tape are used to exaggerate the effect. For example on my Orchestra the bass never growled and wasn’t all there, even after we warmed it up with some tape, I then went to the bass knob and turned it up until it started sounded cloudy and boomy, then backed down, the result of having the tape on and off was then huge. EVERY MIX WILL BE DIFFERENT!!! And there is no such thing as the magic setting; the settings I provided are merely reference to the overall sound we were trying to achieve. And still I do not save presets, for every mix I do, I start the EQ’s, compression, Revebs, Saturations from scratch and play around with the settings. Knowing exactly what you are trying to achieve and the overall settings required to get there is a good thing as it speeds up your fine tuning time (or gives you more of it) without you being completely lost just randomly fiddling with knobs until you get what you were looking for.

Once we have the tape down its all a matter of mixing the volumes. This process should be easier now since the digital fizz is not gone and you can hear the instruments in the mix a lot better, allowing you to get more accurate.

Once I have the tracks all mixed down its time to throw a quick master, at least one that will be good enough. My is advice is that you take a day for each step in the recording process to keep your hearing fresh.

Day 1: Record
Day 2: Mix
Day 3: Master
Day 4: Master Again (to make sure the mix is solid)

So when we pull up the master we will run it through tape one more time (in this case tape 2) and then run it through Warmifier (tube saturation). Tube saturation can get uglier easy if you don’t know how to use it right, this is where having too much gain is less forgiving and why it is essential that you take two days mastering, give your ears a break and plenty of time to rest and then come back to it later. No real easy way to tell you how to use tube saturation, you have to bring the volume up until you hear some warmth, and the harsh high begin to drop, and then turn it off to make sure you didn’t clip (its hard to hear clipping with tubes), you may think you don’t hear clipping but as soon as you turn it off, and then turn it back on, you will hear massive clipping. The clipping is so easy on the ears that sometimes you can’t hear it if you are not comparing it to the original. Just get enough saturation from the tube until you hear some brightness and a little bit more fullness. Once you get there you are done, it won’t be a noticeable difference, but in this case tube saturation is a subtlety.

If done right, without any compression or limiting, you should obtain -10dbRMS to 6dbRMS (depending on how dynamic the raw recordings are) and you should not hear a single clip, absolutely no audible distortion; the ultimate effect, you have a punchier meatier, warmer, more aggressive “in-your-face” tone. It’s ok to have a very high RMS, it doesn’t mean you squashed the dynamics all to hell from the saturation, because the saturation overall if done correctly should not take but 4-6 RMS total and should actually increase peaks, if the RMS is really squashed (or appears to be) usually that means what you used to record wasn’t very dynamic to start with.

Here are the final Mater plug-ins. As you can see it is simple, tape, tube, a very soft limiter and gain adjusted levels.

The final results should be massive, and you will be the baddest mother fucker around

Here is the before and after

Before (Raw):

http://www.mediafire.com/?tgjyuydynam

After Mixing:

http://www.mediafire.com/?4zzyukd1nzn

After

http://www.mediafire.com/?d0jdmmtyzy2

After clip is 44k 16-bit, all other audio was 44k 32-bit

The Raw before clip isn’t 100% raw since some of the instruments had been eq’d prior to being brought into out session. Just with the help of analog emulation and a small hint of reverb were we able to achieve the results

 

[TheWinterSnow]

Conclusion:

And this doesn&#8217;t have to be just tape or tube, this can be any analog outboard device such as a mic pre being used out to warm up a mix, or a compressor. It could be a SSL mic pre with the variable harmonic distortion feature to control the analog coloration of the old SSL boards. Also before any of you pull the stunt of [insert awesome pro producer name here] (<--- Andy Sneap cough cough) stays all ITB, they are using plug-ins for example waves that are based on real analog gear and act in the same linear, non-linear and phase smearing as similar real analog gear. This whole speech is more of an education of getting away from the straight 100% linear or hard limiting world of digital and using the ones and zeroes in a more useful way that results in a more musical final result.

 

[Mutant]

Tagging for future reading.

Thanks

 

[Pot]

Tagging for future reading.

Thanks

me too

 

[cobhc]

Read through this and made some comparison clips using your settings, here's a clip with and without the saturation/colouring.

https://files.getdropbox.com/u/371262/BridgeClip+NoSaturation.mp3
https://files.getdropbox.com/u/371262/BridgeClip+Saturation.mp3

Makes everything sound more Hi-Fi to me, and definitely more powerful. I'll put some time in tweaking those settings soon.

 

[RaDiKaL]

Excellent guide!

Thanks!

 

[GarethSE]

the top end of that saturated clip sounds like a low bitrate mp3 steven haha. the overheads sound really mp3 artifacty.
sounds much closer to that pro sound though. i may well have to give this a spin one day

 

[cobhc]

Hmm, maybe I pushed the limiter to hard on that one, I'm upping new clips..........but dropbox is being gay.

 

[GarethSE]

alright man, link me on msn in a minute man cos ima go for a shower

 

[Mikaël-ange]

Really massive

Tagging for future reading.

Thanks

Same...

 

[JMarz]

Sticky the fuck out of this.

 

[HandsOfDespair]

Thanks a lot!

 

[Lowberg]

Cant wait to read this later after work.

I forgot my glasses and I cant see!

 

[A Midnight Requiem]

Great read with lots of good info. I'm definitely trying this out as soon as I get a chance. Thanks very much!

Does anyone know of any good freeware tape or tube saturation VST's?

 

[DanLights]

great post, surely will deserve a sticky!

 

[musickey]

Good stuff, just one noob question. Are you rendering individual tracks with the emulation, and then pulling them back in the mix? Or are you applying the emulation to group buss's?

And did I read that right? Are you normalizing all the drum tracks in your project or just the stereo mix for the example?